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Getting Organized with Mind Maps

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

One of the biggest challenges I personally have with each site I work with is maintaining a level or organization around the development, planning, and implementation of my own and/or team's efforts.

How many great ideas do I have floating around my desk and office in squirreled away emails, post-it notes, text files on my desktop, items pinned to the bulletin board, web bookmarks, etc.? Before a colleague turned me on to mind maps, it was a ponderous chain!

Now though, I am a highly organized developer with great ideas (and probably some not-so-great) neatly organized into a visual organizational chart (see an example here) with SEO-appropriate labels on branches like:

Landing Pages

State specific

Locale specific

Community types

Linking Strategy

Paid Directories

Blogs

Social Directories

Wikipedia, for the moment, defines a mind map as "a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea."

Now you too may be wondering, "How do I, an accomplished SEOmoz denizen, get my hands on some of that mindmap joy?" You know you're thinking it.

There are many different providers of mindmapping tools out there. I like to use an Ajax-infused service called MindMeister. It's relatively cheap (free for just a few or $4/mo for unlimited maps) and easy to use. They allow you to conveniently share your maps with other team members who can collaborate on the map, and in true Wikipedia-style you can easily undue historical changes. You can also share view-only access with clients who are chomping at the bit for some visual confirmation that you are, in fact, actually doing something under the hood.

But, of course, there are other alternatives out there, a few of which I'll give you below, but you can always consult the great oracle for more.

7 Comments

Nice work Marty. I think process trees are also under appreciated but highly functional when it comes to getting organized or seeing an idea realized. I think I'm going to fool around some with Mindmeister now, it looks slick.

Sounds like a cool tool. I have beeing doing this on paper for a while now. I would like to check it out for easy of use to present to a client. Might help bridge the gap between our clients and the sales team amd the SEM team.